Buonaccorsi later moved to the royal court in Kraków and wrote, among other things, a set of counsels for the king, like some Polish Machiavelli. His writings, which he published under the pen name of Callimachus, his position at the Jagiellon University, and his part in founding, along with the German poet Conrad Celtis, a sort of Polish writers’ workshop, the Sodalitas Litterarum Vistulana, made him a key figure of the Polish Renaissance.
The Italian connection grew stronger as Poles travelled to study or to visit cities such as Padua, Bologna, Florence, Mantua and Urbino. Italians came to Poland, bringing with them amenities and refinements, ranging from painting to postal services. The impact was omnipresent and lasting, nowhere more so than on the language. The first treatise on Polish orthography appeared in 1440, and the Bible was first translated in 1455, for Jagiełło’s last wife, Sophia. In their search for words or expressions to describe hitherto unknown objects or sentiments, the Poles more often than not borrowed from Italian, particularly in areas such as food, clothing, furnishing and behaviour, as well as in the expression of thought. These words rapidly passed from speech into writing, and from writing into print.
The year 1469 saw the first commercial use of Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type, in Venice. The idea was taken up throughout Europe with breathtaking speed: printing presses began operating in Naples, Florence and Paris in 1471; in Spain, the Netherlands and Kraków in 1473; in Wrocław, where the first book in Polish was printed in 1475; and in London in 1476.
By the end of the fifteenth century Poland had become an integral part of late-medieval civilisation. Lithuania, on the other hand, was largely left out of the picture, contributing nothing and gaining little from its association with Christian Europe. Lithuania proper was inhabited by no more than half a million people still pagan in spirit, while the vast expanses it had taken over to the south and east were thinly populated with some two million Slavs who practised Christianity in its eastern rite. At the moment of Władysław Jagiełło’s conversion, this vast dominion boasted five stone castles, at Vilnius (Wilno), Kaunas (Kowno) and Trakai (Troki) in Lithuania; and at Kamieniec and Łuck in what had been Kievan lands. Leaving aside the more fertile south, the land produced little wealth and most of the population subsisted from scratching the topsoil with wooden implements, living in dugouts or timbered cabins.
In 1387 Władysław Jagiełło granted the Lithuanian nobles the first element of personal freedom, the right to hold property. In 1434 he extended the act Neminem captivabimus to the Grand Duchy, but it was some time before the principle was translated into practice. While Poland achieved power-sharing and representation, Lithuania continued to be ruled autocratically. While Jan Ostroróg, Palatine of Poznań, Master of the Jagiellon University and Bachelor of those of Bologna and Erfurt, applied himself in 1467 to writing a treatise on the Polish system of government and a programme for social reform, the average Lithuanian nobleman hardly knew what such words meant.
The only link between the two societies was the Jagiellon dynasty itself, and it was its interests that prevailed. Władysław Jagiełło’s loyalties, to Lithuania and to Poland, were largely subjected to his own dynastic vision. His son Władysław III, killed at the Battle of Varna in 1444 in his twentieth year, never had the opportunity to show his mettle as a ruler. Władysław’s younger brother Kazimierz IV reigned for forty-six years and established himself as a power to be reckoned with—he was, significantly, the only Pole ever to wear the English Garter. His wife Elizabeth of Habsburg bore him seven daughters, who make him the ancestor of every monarch reigning in Europe today, and six sons: one saint, one cardinal, and four kings. Kazimierz was succeeded in Poland by Jan Olbracht, a young prince with a passion for reading who drank, danced and loved hard, dressed like a peacock and worshipped pleasure. His brother Aleksander was a much-loved lightweight who died in 1506 having done little to be remembered or cursed for.
While the Jagiellons acquired a high degree of culture, they did not develop the political maturity demanded by their new role. Throughout this formative century, when the magnates and the szlachta were erecting the structure of their democracy, the Jagiellon kings failed to define the prerogatives of the crown, wasting their resources on foreign adventures instead.
Kazimierz IV’s dynastically-minded foreign policy enmeshed Poland in a number of pointless and damaging conflicts. Turkey and Poland shared a common interest, and in 1439 an embassy from Murad II came to Kraków to negotiate an alliance against the Habsburgs of Austria, who had taken over Hungary. This failed to materialise, since Władysław III took Hungary himself and proceeded to make war on Turkey over Moldavia, a war which cost him his life at the Battle of Varna. Eighty years later, in 1526, Louis Jagiellon, also King of Hungary, was to lose his life in the same way. He was trampled to death in a muddy stream at the Battle of Mohacs, fighting against Suleiman the Magnificent over a Hungary which passed to Ferdinand of Habsburg after the battle.
The feud with Muscovy was equally pointless. After the Tatar invasions, the Lithuanian dukes had occupied the remains of Kievan Rus. The remaining Russian principalities were too weak to think of anything but survival, but with time Muscovy began to nurture ambitions. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 the princes of Muscovy, who were linked by marriage to the Byzantine Emperors, declared their city to be Constantinople’s successor, the ‘Third Rome’, protector of the Eastern Catholic Faith, and spiritual mother of all the Russias—most of which were under Lithuanian dominion. In the fifteenth century, Poland and Lithuania could afford to ignore such posturing. Apart from their own strength, they could count on the Tatar Golden Horde to keep Muscovy in check. In the latter part of the century, however, the Golden Horde went into decline, and its stranglehold over Muscovy was broken.
The Jagiellons’ rivalry with the Habsburgs over Hungary and Bohemia also proved counter-productive, provoking a rapprochement between the Habsburgs and Muscovy, forcing Poland to sign her first treaty with France, in 1500. An English alliance was also considered, but in 1502 the Sejm rejected this on the grounds that England ‘is in a state of continual revolution’. Henry VII and Henry VIII would repeatedly angle for an Anglo-Polish alliance against Turkey but nothing would come of this, as by then Poland needed the support of Turkey, with which she eventually signed an Eternal Peace in 1533.
Whatever international advantages they may have forfeited, the last two Jagiellon kings did give their subjects and their country something of inestimable value. Zygmunt I (known as ‘the Old’), the youngest son of Kazimierz IV, succeeded in 1506 and died in 1548. His son Zygmunt II Augustus became Grand Duke of Lithuania in 1522 and King of Poland after his father’s death. Their combined reign from 1506 to 1572 displayed a certain continuity, even if their persons did not. The strong Solomon-like father was strikingly different from his glamorous, refined son who stands out, along with Francis I and Charles V, to whom he was often compared, as the epitome of the Renaissance monarch. But they both encouraged every form of creative activity and helped to institutionalise a spiritual and intellectual freedom which endured. Above all, they ensured that the murderous Reformation and Counter-Reformation never grew into anything more dangerous in Poland than an unruly debate.
FOUR
Religion and Politics
The Jagiellon realm was theoretically a Roman Catholic kingdom like every other in Christendom, yet the majority of its population was not Catholic. Large numbers of Christian Slavs living within its borders practised the Orthodox rite, acknowledging the Patriarch of Constantinople rather than the Pope. Another group of Christians who paid no heed to Rome were the communities of Armenians living in the major cities of south-eastern Poland.